Factoid courtesy of The Childhood Goat Trauma Association. There's merchandise. Via Metafilter.
Kotaku is looking for interns
To make the cut you'll need to have aspirations as a game journalist (that's with a capital J) and an overwhelming needing to write about stuff. The work is tons of fun and will include a mix of grunt work, some research and maybe even a bit of writing. You will report directly to me or perhaps Ash and while hours are a bit flexible, you'll be expected to be around during a typical work day...virtually. Pay is next to nothing, but this is a calling right and you'll be getting some very worthwhile experience and perhaps, just perhaps, a toe in the door here at Kotaku Towers.
Read more.
Good cover art, or bad cover art?
Idolator calls it the "worst cover art of the year," but I like the cover for the album "Keane - The Theft of Octo."
Update: I should add that there are several terrific desktop wallpapers at Keane's site.
Video: Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls (1936)
Actually, it's a mashup made with bits from old movies and newsreels.
You can see a poster for the movie here. Links via BoingBoing.
Think your job's tough? What if the person judging your performance was someone who failed when he tried to do your job?
That's what NBA referees have to deal with.
Read more.
"First of all, there's incompetence from top to bottom," [former referee Hue] Hollins said. "You have Ronnie Nunn at the top, who was never a top referee, and he is not respected by any ref in the field today. From there, the referee observers in each city are not competent -- I know of one who is a high school football coach -- and some of the group supervisors were failed referees.
"Sure, we make mistakes. But when I left the league, refs were in the 96th to 97th percentile of getting calls right. But it was always the same second-guess -- by incompetent people. From a mental standpoint, it's brutal. Most guys get gun-shy and can't take it. I'm a professional referee for 27 years, and some supervisor who proved he couldn't do it is telling me how to do my job? That's like sending an auto mechanic into O.R. for heart surgery."
Read more.
237 reasons to have sex
After asking nearly 2,000 people why they'd had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons.
[snip]
The researchers, Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, believe their list, published in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, is the most thorough taxonomy of sexual motivation ever compiled. This seems entirely plausible.
[snip]
some respondents of both sexes explained that they'd had sex "to get rid of a headache." It's No. 173 on the list.
Link.
Power at the hospital goes out during an emergency appendectomy
His relatives round up cellphones and use them to to provide light during the surgery. Sounds like a commercial, but it really happened.
Google Translation Buttons
I only recently discovered these wonderful buttons. You can drag buttons to your browser toolbar, and the next time you visit a site in a foreign language, just click on the appropriate button for instant translation.
Robert Bakewell greatly improved the taste of mutton
Intrigued by this post, which described Bakewell's efforts at animal breeding as "sinister" and "skin-crawling," I looked around a bit for more information.
At The Society of Border Leicester Sheep Breeders' site, I learned:
And at Wikipedia, I learned that he greatly improved the taste of mutton. Not a bad epitah.
At The Society of Border Leicester Sheep Breeders' site, I learned:
Robert Bakewell followed on the work of arable pioneers Jethro Tull and Lord “Turnip” Townshend but it is in the field of livestock and especially sheep that Bakewell particularly excelled. At this time all sheep were run together, breeding at random resulting in many different breeds all with their own unique, but random characteristics. Bakewell segregated the sexes, allowed mating only to occur deliberately and specifically. He developed a system of breeding termed “in-and-in”, breeding animals of close relationship with each other or line breeding as it is known today. It is thought he started with the old Lincolnshire breed crossing them with the best of the local Leicestershire types and then by breeding “in-and-in” coupled with rigorous selection and culling was able to fix desirable characteristics for improved meat quality and production through pre-potency. This resultant breed Bakewell called the “New Leicester” becoming known as the “Dishley Leicester”.
And at Wikipedia, I learned that he greatly improved the taste of mutton. Not a bad epitah.
Hard Fi's new album cover to simply say "No Cover Art."
Once Upon a Time in the West
Not bad as desperate marketing ploys go. And ignore the snarky Idolator post. I liked their song "Cash Machine."
The Audi R8 Is A Strange Looking Car
A little too in your face futuristic for my taste. My understanding is that there's a major tie-in with the new Iron Man movie. There is an Audi R8 site with desktop wallpapers, a screensaver, and an incredibly boring intro cinema, but no Iron Man.
Hardon Tea and other unfortunately named food products
You can learn about Hardon Tea here. Or visit Serious Eats to see the chocolate bar known as Plopp. While you're there, don't miss their coverage of the Butter Burger, depicted below. (I think I got a pimple just looking at it.)
Some great writing by William Langewiesche
In SAHARA UNVEILED: A Journey Across the Desert
, he writes of the Belgian husband and wife and their 5-year-old son who decide to make an adventure of crossing the desert in an old Peugeot, in which they make a wrong turn, and then, break down.
Not uplifting, but gripping. The excerpt is from Nancy Rommelmann's review of Langewiesche's new book The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor
, he writes of the Belgian husband and wife and their 5-year-old son who decide to make an adventure of crossing the desert in an old Peugeot, in which they make a wrong turn, and then, break down.The Belgians hoped a truck would come along. For a week they waited, scanning the horizon for a dust-tail or the glint of a windshield. This was in a place, more or less, where the maps still insist on showing a road. The woman felt upwellings of panic. She began to write more frantically, filling pages in single sessions. The water ran low, then dry, and the family grew horribly thirsty. After filtering it through a cloth, they drank the car’s radiator fluid. They had arrived at the danger stage...
After the coolant was gone, the Belgians started sipping gasoline. You would too. Call it petroposia. Saharans have recommended it to me as a way of staying off the battery acid. The woman wrote that it seemed to help...
The boy was weakest, and was suffering terribly. In desperation, they burned their car, hoping someone would see the smoke. No one did. The boy could no longer swallow. His name was Maurice. His parents killed him to stop the pain. Later, the husband cut himself open and allowed his wife to drink his blood. At his request, she broke his neck with a rock. Alone now, she no longer wanted to live. Still, the Sahara was fabulous, she wrote, and she was glad to have come. She would do it again.
Not uplifting, but gripping. The excerpt is from Nancy Rommelmann's review of Langewiesche's new book The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor
Technorati Profile Post
Nothing to see here, just claiming the blog on Technorati. Move along. Move along.
Technorati Profile
Technorati Profile
Watchmen Movie Poster
Larger version here. Interesting marketing scheme, they seem unusually proud of it being a comic book movie.
Buy some "Possessed Books" for your bookshelf
"Antique looking books seem perfectly harmless until someone walks by, then the middle book slides out toward the victim as if it will fall from the shelf. Books also emit spooky sounds for a totally haunted effect."
Buy. Via Boing Boing.
Bruce Schneier Interviews Kip Hawley, TSA Administrator
Hawley come across fairly well, but it's tough to evaluate when most of the answers are variations on trust us, we know more than you.
Video: Sprite Zero Kitesurfing Commercial
The tagline is "Friends. They come and they go. Sprite Zero. No Sugar. No Bull***t." Via I Believe In Advertising.
Photograph of tree across the four seasons
See the tree here. And from the same site, Final Fantasy VII cosplay.
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Teleportation in the Bible
As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, "Look, here is water. Why shouldn't I be baptized?" And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing. Philip, however, appeared at Azotus and traveled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea.
Acts 8:36-8:40. Via Futility Closet.
Acts 8:36-8:40. Via Futility Closet.
K-UNT and other questionable call letters
THE call letters KUNT have landed at a yet-unbuilt low-power digital television station in Wailuku, Maui.
Alarmingly similar to a word the dictionary says is obscene, the call letters were among a 15-page list of new call letters issued by the Federal Communications Commission and released this week.
read more here.
Catholic missionaries are being encouraged to go into the virtual realm of Second Life to save virtual souls
In an article in Rome-based Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica, academic Antonio Spadaro urged fellow Catholics not to be scared of entering the virtual world which may be fertile ground for new converts wishing to better themselves.
"It's not possible to close our eyes to this phenomenon or rush to judge it," Spadaro said. "Instead it needs to be understood ... the best way to understand it is to enter it."
Read more. Via Clusterflock.
Flickr: Gallery of creative (and expensive) business cards
See the gallery here. Via The Graphic Style.
Discovery Channel Shark Runners Game, Play Against Real Sharks
Your ship is virtual, but the sharks are real.
Real-world telemetry data from actual sharks will determine the location and movements of each shark in the game.
[Snip]
The goal of the game is to track down sharks and observe them in order to collect data.
Play here. I played as a member of "FIN," a hard-core ecological activist group devoted to protecting and preserving sharks at all costs.
Some clever ideas for boosting traffic to your site
"It’s silly I know but when I’m in any consumer electronics shop, especially my favorite Apple shop, I fire up all the browsers and point them to my url. Most recently was in a Harvey Norman and I did see a little traffic in my stats."
More here.
More here.
The Strangest Sights In Google Earth
Ever since Google first let people scour the planet from the comfort of their computers through the Google Earth software program, fans have been on a virtual scavenger hunt from the North Pole to the South Pole looking for anything interesting, unusual, or unexplained. From shipwrecks to crop circles, from ads big enough to be read from space to a giant pink bunny nearly the size of a football field, we've collected just a few of the odd and spectacular sights. You can see the same images in Google Maps by clicking the links we provide--but you'll get a better view by copying the coordinates in parentheses after each link and pasting them into Google Earth's 'Fly To' box. We've also created a file of Placemarks that includes all of these sights and more; you can download it and open it with Google Earth. Enjoy the trip!
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